I stopped playing STO about a month ago because PC blew up. That was before the 2gig patch and it was running fine even though I had Core 2 Duo Extreme Quad Core 2.66 with ATI Radeon 4870 card, 2GB RAM and Vista.

Now I have i5 750 2.66 with ATI 5450 card, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 and the FPS is diabolical whenever I go in a mission with a planet with asteroid rings. Even though my PC spec is better than before. It drops to 5-6 fps! Although in other missions with "open-ish" space its ok: 30-40 fps. Still overall I find it strangely sluggish. I read one Alt-Tab solution on the forums but that hasn't helped. I tried window / fullscreen, even lowering the resolution, max fps or not etc, no joy. I have downloaded the latest drivers/Catalyst.

Must be something else. Any ideas please? Oh and in game Video Options, under Troubleshooting I have Video Card options - Auto; HD 5450 #1; and HD 5450 #2 ! Anyone else have that?

As the poster above said, switch DL off on the ground, and when in space you can enable it again, its obviously some type of issue with the game itself so it no doubt will need to be addressed properly by the Dev's with a fix for all.

I'm having the same problem. I stopped playing for awhile then came back and had to download a big patch. The graphics were fine before but now space is flickering different colors and the game has become unplayable. I am using an ATI Radeon 4800 and I downloaded the newest driver and the game is still flickering different colors in space. Does anyone know how to fix this?

The problem I keep having is that although the FPS counter shows something like 50fps, it really feels more like 25fps. I had found out that disabling "framerate stabilizer" and "auto-stabilize framerate" gets rid of the stuttering and makes the game run much more smoothly, while FPS stayed the same. With the patch that came out a few days ago, it's back to stuttering at ~50fps, although the former mentioned two options are still disabled.

The problem I keep having is that although the FPS counter shows something like 50fps, it really feels more like 25fps. I had found out that disabling "framerate stabilizer" and "auto-stabilize framerate" gets rid of the stuttering and makes the game run much more smoothly, while FPS stayed the same. With the patch that came out a few days ago, it's back to stuttering at ~50fps, although the former mentioned two options are still disabled.

Run STO in windowed mode, then use a couple of gadgets to monitor your CPU and GPU usage. At least then you'll be able to see where the problem is. If you're getting high framerates and things still feel jerky, it could be that your CPU is not up to the task.

Many have been asking for Cryptic to fix the bad slowdown etc for the 'M' chips , they have never even bothered to do that and it anoys me , we have to run ground more or less with the lowest setings , even though we can play every other game out there on max , Cryptic dont care soon players wont.